


for the end and for the bad

by BellumGerere



Series: ruthless calculus [3]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: 5+1 Things, FebuWhump2021, Gen, Impaling, Minor Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard, Minor Thane Krios/Shepard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:41:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29078772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BellumGerere/pseuds/BellumGerere
Summary: “You’re not worried?”“Oh, I’m worried.” The confession is made in such a light tone that it would be hard to take her seriously if he didn’t already know that Celia is always serious. “But dwelling on it isn’t going to get us anywhere.”(or, five times celia shepard didn't panic and one time she did)
Series: ruthless calculus [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960111
Kudos: 3





	for the end and for the bad

**Author's Note:**

> honestly wild how i (a person who loves to work tropes into my fics in every way i can) somehow haven't written a bunch of the really big fic ones? i've never done fake dating, no bed sharing (unless you count the hospital-bed scene in awal, i guess) and nothing in this format until now. the febuwhump prompt this was written as a fill for ('impaling') kind of worked for the last part of this, though, so i went ahead and just. wrote the whole thing.
> 
> this covers bits of all three games, but i put it later in the series because the events of the last bit lead more or less directly into 'the drowning,' so that seemed like the logical place chronologically (also fun fact the title for this fic is a line from the song i named 'the drowning' after). since this includes all games that means both of celia's romances, so there's some shep/kaidan and shep/thane in here as well, but since neither ship is the main focus i didn't tag them as relationships, just additional tags -bel

I.

Less than an hour before they’re due to arrive at Ilos, Kaidan wakes up in Commander Shepard’s quarters. _Celia’s quarters_ , he reminds himself; calling her by her title after everything that’s just happened seems ridiculous. He can still feel the warmth of her skin against his, the press of her lips on his shoulder, can picture her hair splayed across the pillow. But the more he wakes up, the more the reality of what they are about to do sets in, and with that comes anxiety. He knows without asking that she won’t ask him to come down to the surface with her. She rarely brings him anywhere if she can help it, though their interactions on the ship had become—well, had led to this. To him in her bed, blinking up at the ceiling.

He turns his head to the side and she’s already up, already dressed, her hair pulled back into the bun she wears it in under her helmet. She’s looking into a little mirror on the desk, filling in her lips with dark lipstick, but when she hears him stir she stops, turns her head to the side enough to make eye contact with him. The corner of her mouth turns up, and suddenly every concern he had about breaking regs to be with her falls by the wayside. He’d been starting to think he’d never see her smile like that.

“Much longer and I would’ve had to wake you up myself,” she says, turning back to her task and leaving him to pull his clothes back on. The whole thing is strangely domestic—there’s no pretense to it, and he hadn’t expected her to be the snuggling type—but at the same time, the distance she’s put between them feels wider than ever. “We should be there any minute. I’m taking Garrus and Liara down with me.” A heaviness settles in the pit of his stomach. He’s not surprised, but at the same time, he had hoped that the intimacy growing between them would make her more inclined to include him on missions. For one of this magnitude, though…it only makes sense that she’d go with the people she’d been fighting with this whole time, not to mention the grim reality of Ashley’s death hanging over them all. An impossible choice, and even now, he can’t say for sure whether he thinks Celia made the right call.

“Right.” He clears his throat as she turns around, the both of them fully dressed now, sizing each other up. Not as though she’d look any different, realistically, but he had wanted—something. What, he doesn’t know. “And me?”

Her lips twist into a frown, and she leans back against the wall. “I need you here, to watch the Mako’s cameras. Someone’s got to be on them at all times, to know where we are.” She must sense the frustration in him, because when he steps a bit closer she doesn’t back away like she usually does, an attempt to keep space between them. She straightens up, but lets him approach. “It’s an important job,” she says, and he knows she’s not trying to placate him; that’s not how she is. “We don’t know what we’re going into down there.”

“You’re not worried?”

“Oh, I’m worried.” The confession is made in such a light tone that it would be hard to take her seriously if he didn’t already know that Celia is always serious. “But dwelling on it isn’t going to get us anywhere.” She looks pointedly at the door and then back to him, and he steps aside. Before she can leave, though, he grabs her arm. He can feel her tense under his grip, but when she looks back, her face is neutral.

There are so many things he wants to say, questions he wants to ask—is she taking what just happened as seriously as he is? Do they even have a chance beyond this one encounter, if they survive at all?—but the only thing that comes out of his mouth in the end is “be careful.” She smiles again, a little, and raises an eyebrow as if to say _aren’t I always?,_ but the reassurance doesn’t ease the dread he feels. The only thing that could do that is seeing her, whole and safe and back on the ship, after this is all over.

Later, when she drives the Mako _through a fucking mass relay_ , he’s able to recognize that it’s taken them to the Citadel before it crashes and both the camera feed and tracking cut out, and they get there in time to help take out Sovereign, and when he sees her again in the clinic, bandaged and bruised but otherwise fine, he doesn’t complain about being left behind.

II.

The ship is on fire.

There’s so much going on that Joker doesn’t have the time—or, frankly, the brainpower—to register anything else; all his focus is on the controls in front of him, and there’s no room for distractions, though it’s becoming clearer by the second that there’s not much he can do. All the escape pods but one have already launched, and there can’t be more than a few other people left onboard, and if he can keep things together until everyone else is ready to evacuate, and then get to the pod himself, that will be enough. But he’s always been stubborn, and so when CJ shows up and puts a hand on his arm, insisting they leave, he refuses.

_I’m not abandoning the Normandy_ , he insists, _I can still save her_ , but CJ has already pulled him halfway out of the seat, her grip on his arm bone-crushingly tight—in his case, a very real concern. She’s just in time, too, because the ship that’s already torn them in half is coming around once more, and she braces herself with one hand on the console and one hand on him until the worst of it has passed. Next thing he knows, she’s yanking him upright again, ignoring his complaints as she hauls him to the last escape pod and all but shoves him in. He’s the only one in it, he realizes with a jolt; everyone else must be in the pods that already launched or—he doesn’t even want to think it.

There’s still time for the two of them, though, if CJ would only get in the fucking pod after him, but there’s another round of explosions as he’s strapping himself in, and it knocks her back, away from the pod’s entrance. He watches helplessly as she grips the wall, legs already pulled out from under her now that her magboots don’t have anything large enough to stick to. Her head is turned in his direction, and he doesn’t know if they’re making eye contact or not, but he can practically see the moment she decides her next move—her hands slip, and he yells for her, desperate, first her title and then her name, _Celia_ , a name that hasn’t passed his lips since he gave her the nickname years ago, but she must’ve slammed the button for the pod because the doors slide shut and it launches, and the last view he has of his best friend is her floating amidst the wreckage of the Normandy, eerily calm.

It’s that more than anything that scares him, the thought that she’s giving up because there’s no way out, no hope that she can cling to some piece of debris long enough for a ship to come around, and he pounds at the door of the escape pod until his hands are bloody and at least two of his fingers are broken from the pressure, but it won’t open until it lands or another ship picks it up, and by then he knows it will be too late. When he is finally rescued, several hours later, and the door slides away to reveal Kaidan’s exhausted face, and everyone is looking past him into the pod as if they expect to see CJ there—it’s only then that it hits, only then that he starts shaking.

He stumbles through a recollection of what he’s now certain were the last moments of her life, each word bringing him closer and closer to a breakdown, but he leaves out her surrender. She wouldn’t want anyone to know how she’d stopped fighting, and he’ll take that with him to his grave.

III.

Even after spending several days on the Normandy with her, Miranda still isn’t sure what to think of Commander Shepard. It doesn’t help that they’ve barely had a full conversation in all that time, either; she seems content to spend most of it in the cockpit, talking to the pilot that Miranda is now excessively glad they recruited. Shepard ignores Chambers’ attempts to engage in conversation, she and Jacob seem to have reached an agreement to stay out of each others’ way, and the only real exchange she’d had with Miranda was asking for some information about their possible recruits on Omega. It had all been very…professional. Cold, almost, a trait she’s not unfamiliar with, and one she’d expected based on everything she knew about Shepard’s personality and her reputation within the Alliance. Still, to have that chill turned on her is more unnerving than she’d expected.

Zaeed Massani is waiting for them at the docking bay just like he’d said he would be, and they’re able to get Mordin Solus on their side fairly easily, and after they’ve shown him to the ship Shepard decides she wants to look into the Archangel situation as well. Miranda and Jacob exchange looks, but neither of them argue with her—they’re already on thin ice with each other, all of them, and besides, the ruthless efficiency with which Shepard operates means that the whole stop on Omega has taken less than a day, and time is something they have very little of right now. It’s not difficult to infiltrate the mercs’ base of operations, nor to fight their way up to where Archangel is once the other groups turn on them, but it’s worrying how Archangel himself has suddenly stopped shooting at them. Even with the obvious infighting, he should be focused on taking out every enemy, and he has no proof that isn’t what they are.

When they finally reach him, though, and he takes his helmet off and Shepard recognizes him immediately, things start to make a little more sense.

Shepard shows more emotion in the next few minutes than Miranda’s seen out of her all week. When she sees Garrus Vakarian’s face the beginnings of a smile creep onto her own for just a moment before she schools her expression into the cool neutrality that’s become familiar. They talk for a minute; she makes a comment about the shots that hit her—barely grazed her, more like—and it isn’t until Garrus responds that Miranda realizes she was making a _joke_. The whole thing is so surreal that even though she’s watching it happen in front of her, she still can’t quite believe it. A glance over at Jacob shows he seems to be feeling much the same, but he only shrugs and follows the others over to the window so they can assess the situation facing them.

It would be an impossible quandary for anyone else, but for Shepard—she stays at the window with Garrus, taking the mercs out with near-perfect headshots like she was born to it, while Miranda and Jacob take care of the few who manage to make it into the building. She seems hesitant to leave Garrus’s side when they realize there are groups making their way through the basement levels, but Miranda offers to stay with him, and after a moment of uncomfortable staring and a curt nod, Shepard takes Jacob and goes to head the mercs off. There’s not much time for talking after that, but more than once she glances over to find Garrus looking back. She can’t blame him; he’s just seen a friend effectively come back from the dead, and the fact that she bears the Cerberus insignia—it certainly raises more questions than they’ve got time to answer. He seems to trust Shepard, though, and the four of them are effective as a team. Even the gunship doesn’t pose much of a challenge, thanks to Shepard’s—creative—resolution to that situation earlier.

That still doesn’t stop the mercs from shooting a rocket more or less straight into Garrus’s face.

Miranda’s not quite sure what she expected, given that very little of this mission has gone how she expected, but despite her show of emotion earlier, Shepard is eerily quiet, finishing off the remaining mercs and then barking orders for pickup into her omnitool. She whispers something to Garrus at one point, Miranda thinks, but she’s too far away to make out what it is, and her expression is as impassive as ever. Even when they arrive back on the ship, and the two are separated, Shepard doesn’t speak, only checks her messages in silence and then heads up to her quarters after giving Joker orders to head towards Ilium; there was nothing left on Omega for them now.

When Garrus wakes, meets them in the command center with bandages covering half his face, he makes some joke to Shepard about Krogan women and scars, and she reaches up to her own face, drawing a finger across one of the shining red cracks like she’s memorized where they are, and says “Should I be worried, then?” The breath Miranda lets out in surprised amusement is quiet enough to go unnoticed, but the joke, and the grin that follows, make her wonder, now that she’s seen through the cracks, just how much of a ruse the ruthlessness actually is.

IV.

All things considered, the assault on the Collector base is going smoothly—or, at least, no one has died yet, despite a couple of uncomfortably close calls. The time and credits spent updating the ship, improving their weapons, has all paid off, and the crew fights as a single unit, working with a cohesion that Thane has rarely seen, though, of course, he hasn’t spent much time with the bulk of the group. Celia had taken him and Garrus and split off from the others, and even the three of them are playing off each other more fluidly than ever before. They all have their comms open, but they remain mostly unused; they’ve had months to learn each other, given the frequency with which they are the three going on missions, and it shows. They make it most of the way through the base with little cause for concern, relatively speaking, and when they reach the place where the rest of the Normandy’s inhabitants are being held, they’re alive. She sends Mordin to escort them back to the ship, and the rest of them gather in a loose circle, looking back and forth between the closed door behind them and the hallway ahead.

They don’t have much time, but Celia locks eyes with each of them for a moment, the flicker of her visor the only thing interrupting the stares. He doesn’t think he’s imagining that she holds his gaze a little longer than everyone else, nor the deep inhale and the twinge of sadness he sees pass across her face as her eyes slide to Garrus, next to him. There’s Collectors outside the door, no one knows how many, and they all agree without hesitation, when Celia brings it up, that most of them need to stay back and defend their position. She looks at them all again, quicker glances, and the noises on the other side of the door are getting louder when she finally calls for Jack and Tali.

It takes him a moment to register the words. He had been _so sure_ that she would do the thing that has worked for her, and it isn’t until the three of them are already climbing up onto the platform that will take them deeper into the base that the full extent of her decision sinks in. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the others’ abilities—everyone on the Normandy had more than proven themselves capable—but going into this mission knowing that he would likely be sticking close to Celia had helped to ease some of the dread he’d felt the night prior.

He has never seriously considered the possibility that he will outlive her. Now, it’s all he can think about.

“Anything you want to say before you go?” Miranda prompts, though they all know full well that there won’t be a speech. There’s no time, and it’s not the way Celia does things. The question prompts a smile, though, just a small one, and to his surprise she does reply:

“It would be a shame if any of you got killed _now_.”

“We’ll try our best not to,” Garrus says, followed by a slightly more prominent grin from Celia and a few scattered laughs from anyone else—the kind of uneasy humor that comes from staring death in the face. And then she’s looking at Thane again, a long, intense stare, and her lips part the slightest bit as if she’s going to say something, but instead she turns around. Hits the button on the platform. The last thing he sees of her is the side of her face as she cranes her neck to look back.

It's—a blur after that, a rush, slipping into the kind of desperate focus he rarely finds himself reaching for, a survival instinct. There are nine of them, but there are so _many_ Collectors, and he stays near the back of the group with Garrus, picking them off one by one with perfect headshots. There is a knot in his stomach, a persistent reminder of what they are protecting, what they—what he—will lose if they allow anything past the barricade they’ve made themselves. By the time there’s even a slight break in the swarm, the floor of the hallway in front of them is littered with bodies. From there it’s a steady press forward to the rendezvous point, as uncomplicated as it can be given the situation, but it doesn’t ease his worry, even as he boards the ship with the rest of them.

He hesitates in the airlock, torn between waiting for her and staying out of the way. The others clear out quickly, prepping for escape, but Garrus meets his gaze as he’s leaving and it’s clear he’s thinking the same thing—someone ought to make sure she gets _on_ the ship. As the minutes drag on, he starts to pace; he finds it impossible to stay still, not when everything in him is screaming to go back for her. It’s only when he hears Joker on the comms from down the hall, and the familiar static of Celia’s voice, that he calms somewhat, but that calm is dashed moments later when he’s joined in the airlock by Joker, gun in hand as he takes up a position near the door’s switch.

“Hope you’re ready for whatever follows her up,” he says, and opens the airlock as Thane brings up his own gun. The ship is hovering near a ledge, Collectors immediately opening fire as the two of them shoot back, and in the distance Thane can see the three of them sprinting towards the ship—Celia lags behind the others, occasionally pausing to direct a shot at one of their pursuers, and that nagging dread clenches tight at him again. The other two make it safely to the ship, jumping on one after the other and turning back with weapons readied, but Celia is still sprinting, and the base is collapsing right in front of them.

A platform like the one that had taken her away earlier falls, knocking the closest section of the ledge away, and he realizes that if she jumps now, from this far away, there’s no guarantee she’ll make it. Even as he thinks it he’s already sheathing his weapon, moving towards the edge of the ship with one hand gripping its side—the others shift to give him space, having come to the same conclusion—she pushes herself off the ledge with impressive strength, and he can see the aura of her biotics flaring to help propel her forward—and she’s just short of the ship, as he feared, but she grabs his hand and anchors herself against its side. She reaches out with her other hand and Tali grabs it, pulling her forward and safely inside the confines of the airlock as Joker flips the switch to close it.

He’s already heading towards the cockpit, and they all follow as EDI counts down to the base’s detonation. By the time she reaches zero, they’re already moving, just far enough away from the blast that they’ll be able to outpace it. It isn’t until they’re back through the relay, though, that everyone breathes a sigh of relief, hands relaxing on weapons.

Celia has turned the display of her visor off, leaving her vision unobscured as she looks over at him. Strands of dark hair have escaped her bun, hanging loose around her face, and she’s still breathing heavily, but she looks—nonplussed. She bridges the few inches between them to grab his hand, the only indication that she was even a little worried. “Well,” she says, voice as steady as her face. “Good job, everyone.”

V.

James doesn’t get it. If he were in Shepard’s place, he would be ordering the damn ship to turn around—they’re not going to do any good on the Citadel when Earth needs capable fighters. He tells her as much, as they’re heading towards Mars, and is almost immediately shut down. No one else even bothers trying to argue with her, and she leaves for her quarters in silence, carrying her armor. This is the Commander Shepard he’d been hearing about for years; ruthless, cold to the point of cruelty sometimes. The woman he’d spent the past six months guarding was gone in an instant.

“Has she always been like that?” he asks no one in particular, and Kaidan shrugs. James had noticed the way he looked after her on Earth, before the attack, and he wonders if there had, perhaps, been something going on between them, something more than friendship—or whatever it is she has with her shipmates—though he doesn’t dare ask. Clearly, it’s in the past; even if it wasn’t so obvious in their interactions, or lack thereof, Shepard is with someone else now. He realizes, as he starts to take apart his gun in the hopes of getting a quick clean on it before they land, that he might be one of only two or three people on the ship who are privy to that particular piece of information, and so when Kaidan asks about his months guarding Shepard, he sticks to noncommittal, vague answers. He’d rather not see her anger turned on him again.

He has to ask, though, after seeing how carefully she’d hidden and protected them for the past six months, about the rings she hasn’t been wearing. Anything could have happened in the mad dash to the ship, and he’d hate to see her lose them after that. Having the others around means he has to be careful with his wording, though, so when they’re in the shuttle on their way down to the surface of Mars, he spares a glance from the pilot’s seat towards where she’s perched behind him. “Ce—Commander,” he says, and she looks at him with an eyebrow raised, catching his slip. They can’t afford to be too familiar with each other, either, not now that the Normandy is technically an Alliance vessel again. “Do you…?” He huffs, frustrated at his inability to carefully word the question, and holds up his left hand for a few seconds instead.

She stares, brow furrowed, and then an amused expression crosses her face for the barest second. She nods. Next to her, Kaidan looks more confused than ever, but he doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t acknowledge him either—not until he asks about Cerberus, after they’ve fought their way through a host of soldiers. Then she’s angry, then he knows once again to leave himself out of things.

He doesn’t know much of what happens after that, not after she sends him back to the shuttle, only that they’ve brought an extremely injured Kaidan back onboard with them, and then they’re speeding towards the Citadel while she paces the length of the cargo hold. Back and forth, over and over; he watches her for what feels like hours. Maybe it is. Sometimes when she passes him she’ll look his way, but more often than not her eyes are trained in front of her. She’s shed her armor, and under that were the same clothes she’s been wearing since they left Earth, tags catching the light against the black of her tank top. There’s blood on it, on her pants and her shoulders and the sliver of her stomach that’s exposed. She’s slipped the rings out of her pocket and back onto her finger, and every once in a while she’ll twist them around.

Still, through it all, her face doesn’t change, still the same calm mask it had been. Even when they arrive at the Citadel, and she watches as they wheel Kaidan away, it stays the same. But she has to take it off sometime, he thinks, and as she leaves him behind and gets in the car that will take her to the embassies, he can only hope it won’t be too soon.

VI.

They’ve been running so fast for so long, trying to reach the Councilor in time, that when Thane arrives Garrus doesn’t even realize who it is in front of him until he’s watching them fight. He knew Thane was around, of course, knew Celia had gone to see him and that he was the one who’d made contact when they tried to land, but Garrus’s impression was that he was moving away from the fight, not towards it, though once the thought crosses his mind he realizes how ridiculous it sounds. In front of him, Celia has frozen, gun still aimed, watching the fight play out in front of her. He wonders if she’s even aware of the horror written on her face, of the way that she has let her emotions slip. He starts to circle around to one side of her; on the other side, Liara does the same, and the look she gives him when they glance at each other is just as worried as he feels.

The fight barely lasts a minute. When he thinks back on it later, that might be a good thing.

A second thing he doesn’t process until it’s already happened: the blade goes right through Thane, is pulled out just as quickly, and the cry of his name that Garrus hears as the assassin vaults over the railing and runs towards the door comes from Celia’s throat. It’s barely even recognizable as her voice—he and Liara have known her longer than anyone else on the crew, with the exception of Joker, and he doesn’t think either of them have _ever_ heard her sound like this, so raw and broken. She’s after him a heartbeat later, and Garrus is after her, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Thane pull himself off the ground, using the desk beside him as leverage. Garrus makes it outside just in time to watch the assassin land on top of a skycar that immediately speeds away. Shots ring out, but he’s already put too much distance between them, and Garrus turns back to see Thane collapse back onto the floor, his back against the wall. There’s already small pools of blood forming where he sits.

Celia runs towards him, and he can hear her muttering under her breath— _no, please god no_ —and as she kneels in front of him Garrus looks over at Liara, who stares back helplessly. It’s painful to watch her; she’d never said so in as many words, but he knows this is what she fears above all else, and to watch it happen…he was a bit surprised to see her façade shatter so completely, but not to see it in response to this.

“I have time,” he hears Thane rasp when he gets close enough to hear them. “Catch him.”

“ _No_. I’m not leaving you.”

She’s seconds away from crying, he can hear it in her voice, and he knows that given her way she wouldn’t move from that spot, but Bailey is on the comms requesting an update, and the assassin is getting farther away with every second she spends here. Thane lifts a hand to cup her face, and it’s so unbearably intimate and tender that Garrus looks away. He says something too quiet to make out, but whatever it is, it works, because Celia takes a deep, shuddering breath and stands. When he turns back, she’s requesting a medical transport on the comms and updating Bailey on the situation, her voice steady now even as her eyes are glossed with tears.

“Stay here,” she says to Liara, prompting a nod. “Make sure the transport shows up, then come find us if you can. I’ll try and keep you updated on where we go.” Garrus is heading towards one of the cars parked not too far from them, but he is close enough to hear her say “I love you,” and to hear Thane reply in kind. It’s the last thing Garrus ever hears him say.

**Author's Note:**

> there are a few reasons that i didn't write thane's actual death into this but the main one is because i didn't want to :) this bit already hurt enough and i don't think i could handle it if i tried to do that lmao. this stops not long before and 'the drowning' picks up right after but i mean we all know what happens. and speaking of 'the drowning,' it'll get a new chapter in a few days; several of these prompts work really well for what i already had in mind so i'm taking this opportunity to add some more to that fic


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